Manage leads
A primary goal of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys is to generate interest and then find, nurture, and qualify leads for salespeople. As mentioned, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys is centered around contacts, which is the only type of customer entity that you can target by using a customer journey. When a contact shows interest in one of your products or services, you'll either generate a lead record that relates to that contact or allow a landing page to generate the lead automatically. The lead represents an expressed interest by the related contact in some specific product. A given contact might have several leads associated with it, each representing a different level of interest in a different product or offer.
You can associate each lead with either a contact or an account. If you choose to create account-based leads, then each account must be associated with one or more contact records because your segments and customer journeys still need to include and target contacts, not accounts. In this regard, accounts are essentially treated as collections of one or more contacts. For more information, see Account-based marketing.
To view, create, or edit a lead, go to Outbound marketing > Lead management > Leads. This path brings to you a standard list view, which you can use to search, sort, filter, create, and delete your leads. Open any lead to view its details.
For more information, see Use leads to register and track expressions of interest.
When automatically generating leads (such as after a page submission or event registration), Customer Insights - Journeys applies a matching strategy to decide whether a lead already exists before it creates new ones. Each matching strategy compares field values for the lead that the system is about to create against the matching field values for existing records and only creates a new record if no match in field values is found. This method helps ensure that:
You'll avoid creating duplicate leads.
You can use landing page submissions to update existing lead records.
New leads can be associated with existing contacts when they are available.
The new interaction is still recorded and credited to the correct contact for lead-scoring purposes.
For more information, see How form settings affect lead scoring and interaction records.
Segments, customer journeys, and other Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys features require that each lead has a contact associated with it. However, sales-driven setups might follow a different model, where leads are created as the first touchpoint, without necessarily having contact records associated with them.
To solve this issue, you can use Dynamics 365 custom workflows to automatically generate and link a contact record for each new or existing unmatched lead record. For more information, see Automatically generate contacts for orphaned leads.
You can also use the marketingonly flag on the contact entity to differentiate the automatically generated (marketing-only) contacts from other types of contacts. This makes it easy to tell these two types of contacts apart and to set up list views for salespeople that only show sales-qualified contacts without including the marketing-only contacts. For more information, see Keep automatically generated contacts from confusing users.
For more information, see The lead lifecycle, and Market to leads with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys.